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Does D&D really have to try an emulate every new fad that comes along?

What ever happened to just making new RPGs to handle new stuff? If you want to play Harry Potter, then there should be a separate Harry Potter RPG. Why is everyone so desperate to piggyback on the D&D brand?

A FAD is a temporary trend, but one persons fab is another person Revelation. D&D needs to evolve & improve over the years, else everyone would still be using 3 little white books. If you dread change, stay with your current edition. No one really steals your old books & drinks your soft drinks in the dark of the night.

Hey, old people.
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The same thing can be said for Conan, for Frodo, for the Gray Mouser, for... whatever else traditional sources you can name for D&D.
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It doesn't matter anymore.
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So now I'm going to tell you that you need to go step back, and - in essence - go away.
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I want a game that can give me things like what I've seen in the Redwall series, in Last Airbender, in anime like Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo.

You have no idea what your talking about. Conan and "frodo" have each made more money and occupy more attention in RECENT video games, and movies than samarai shampoo and all the other **** fiction you mention put together.

Also just wondering if the OPs post is fair on these forums? I know I've gotten some warnings in the past so I just want to know if this is an acceptable type of post. Because it would be fun to start a similar thread targetting some other playstyles and preferences in an equally offensive manner.

Also just wondering if the OPs post is fair on these forums? I know I've gotten some warnings in the past so I just want to know if this is an acceptable type of post. Because it would be fun to start a similar thread targetting some other playstyles and preferences in an equally offensive manner.

I reported it and have been biting my tongue to keep from posting something as offensive as the OP. IMHO this thread is a disaster in slow motion.

Extremely niche anime series is hardly 'new guard'. The only one mentioned that is relevant to the discussion is Harry Potter and it simply isn't high fantasy and doesn't belong in Dungeons & Dragons.

The newer popular fantasy are novels like A Song of Ice and Fire, The Wheel of Time, Sword of Truth, and The Inheritance Cycle and video games like Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, Kingdoms of Amalur, Warcraft, and Guild Wars. Literally all of the newer fantasy plays on tropes created by their predecessors, even ones that are touted as different. The systems like the Vancian magic system echoes throughout all mediums of fantasy.

Tolkein still has more influence in the fantasy genre than J. K. Rowling will ever hope to have. His books are still being made into movies and video games, her works will only be a memory in 40 years.

If I'd run D&D any edition with the RAW, I'd get a lot less players. But the good thing is you can modify the rules relatively easily to suit any group, and the chances are someone else has already done this for you.

Yeah I think us old flatuli may sometimes insist on keeping something around too long (the whole Vancian magic disaster is one example to me) but you can option anything in or out in D&D as long as you do not totally kill the balance.

What could possibly happen is that the examples of what you can do with the system should include modern fantasy like Game of Thrones, the Pern books... LoTR is still modern to me.

And hey, I haven't even gotten around to read Dragonlance yet... I wonder if I will ever have the money to get the books, the possibility to convince my husband to buy them and the time to read them on top of my already long "must read" list...

This is pretty simple in my eyes. D&D should draw inspiration from many different sources, old and new. Let the game evolve, but at the same time don't try to brush where it came from under the rug. The fact of the matter is that a great deal of all of this is aesthetics, it's the window dressing in your head and the presentation at the table. D&D is a big tent game, you can do a lot of different styles with the same mechanics. The game should acknowledge this and invite you to draw your inspirations from what you like. I sincerely hope that the text references movies, pulp, sword and sorcery, high fantasy, comics, manga, anime, video games, mythology, et c. It should be inclusive of peoples' taste, not exclusive.

Oni

"Each man, one way.
Each horse, one stance.
Each church, one buddha.
Each master to his own technique."

D&D became the success it has been over three plus decades by emulating a certain genre.

D&D became a success by combining several different, almost mutually-incompatible genres together. Neat trick, that.

Or, to paraphrase Cowboy Bebop: "And the work which has become a genre unto itself shall be called: Dungeons and Dragons".

Originally Posted by GM Dave

Where do people get the crazy idea that DnD hasn't changed and been influenced by the tropes of it's time.

They make it up in the heads?

They misremember the past?

They deliberately misrepresent the past?

I think that about covers it.

Originally Posted by ArmoredSaint

They already tried it your way. They already tried to push the "old guard" aside--changed things, rejected long-standing traditions, and gave the finger to nostalgic appeal--in 4th edition and look what happened?

The "traditions" 4e pushed aside were those of D&D 3E, specially, the mechanics, not the collected works of Howard, Burroughs, Tolkien, et al.

I'm playing Pathfinder this afternoon, a game considered by a lot of current gamers to be the true successor to D&D. My character bears no resemblance to anything out of the old guard of fantasy authors. What *does* she resemble? Hawkeye from the Avengers with a dash of Storm from the X-Men. This is what D&D does well. Mash things up. Even relatively recent things.

No thanks. The "new guard" were given their chance and they dropped the ball.

This is a misreading of 4e's market failure. 3e and Pathfinder are also "new guard" in terms of their tone and fidelity to older literary sources like Tolkien and Howard.

Fans of the newer fantasy fiction failed to support the brand in sufficient numbers to make aiming the game at their tastes a worthwhile endeavor.

This is untrue. Newer fantasy fans help explain the popularity of 3e and Pathfinder.

Originally Posted by Doug McCrae

Most of D&D is the way it is because a few young guys in the early 70s thought up some stuff, in a very short space of time, that seemed cool. It's a weird mix of wargame, classic fantasy and 70s pop culture.

Another excellent point, Doug. Some people have a tendency to treat original D&D as some kind of scholarly treatise that set out to define/catalog classic and essential fantasy literature.

Except it was just an eclectic bunch of shi stuff two dudes really liked.

People will turn anything into orthodoxy, won't they? Even rule about about pretending to be elves....

They want nostalgia, and they're prepared to pay. If these guys had been around in 1974, in their mid-40s to mid-50s, they'd have *hated* D&D.

I'm closing in on my mid-40s, and I can't say I'm immune to nostalgia. I want to see plenty familiar elements in 5e. Then again, I'll take Cowboy Bebop over Conan the Cimmerian any day of the week, and I'll be deeply disappointed if 5e eschews contemporary influences/references.

I am 36, so not sure where I fall in the OP's mind. Most people I game with are between the ages of thirty and fifty.

With all due respect to the original poster, telling people to just go away isn't going to achieve anything. Either these folks are an important customer block or they aren't. WOTC getsto make the final call either way. Also, in D&D terms, telling people to go away usually results in a heavy penalty on your diplomacy roll.

But i think you are assuming a lot here. If the old generation goes away in a blink, that doesn't mean calls for vancian casting and other traditional D&D trappings will dissapear. Lots of people who started the ame quite recently like these things.